Vol. 10, No.

1, June 2022
page 11—19
https://jurnal.ugm.ac.id/poetika https://doi.org/10.22146/poetika.v10i1.74114

ECOLOGICAL LAMENTATION AND ADVOCACY IN EKA

BUDIANTA’S SELECTED POEMS

Novita Dewi
Universitas Sanata Dharma
Jl. Mrican Baru, Mrican, Caturtunggal, Depok, Sleman, Yogyakarta, 55281
Email: novitadewi@usd.ac.id

ABSTRACT
Writing about environmental issues before and after climate change and other human-made ecological
damages, Eka Budianta has continually taken up environmental topics in his oeuvre. The study presented in
the present article aims to scrutinize 6 (six) selected poems by Eka Budianta to see how the poet has dealt
with ecological debate throughout the years. The study draws insights from criticisms within Environmental
Humanities framework and uses a qualitative-interpretative method. The six poems comprise four poems
written in 1984, i.e., “River Notes”, “The Yearning of the Wind”, “Song for Tiom”, and “Song of a Townsman”; a
poem written in 2012 titled “Setelah Sudaraku Tenggelam”; and the most recent one, written in 2020, “Sungai
Sejati”. The lines and stanzas of each poem are read and interpreted according to their respective themes,
poetic devices, and contents to see if they demonstrate the principles of Ecopoetry. The study results in the
following findings. First the lamentation for the loss of nature is present in “River Notes”, “The Yearning of the
Wind”, and “Song of a Townsman”. Second, “Song for Tiom” and “Setelah Saudaraku Tenggelam” are elegies
for, respectively, ecological destruction in Papua and the Situ Gintung Lake tragedy. Third, optimistic tone
is palpable in Eka Budianta’s newest poem “Sungai Sejati”. Fourth, the inclusion of non-human agency like
landscape, plants, and animals helps reinforce the green messages the poet seeks to express. This study
concurs that literature can partake in exposing global climate change as well as advocating sustainable
living in a way often ignored in ecological praxis that only celebrates concrete results.

Keywords: Ecopoetry, non-human agency, green messages, landscape, plants

INTRODUCTION
Climate change and human-caused ecological
degradation have proven that planet Earth is sick. In
2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPPC) reported that the level of human-made CO2
emissions, as of 2010, must be reduced to 45% by
2030 in order to reach zero by 2045 (Office, 2020).
Social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic has
made the earth cooler for a while. The ozone layer
is said to have started to thicken slightly. However,
this condition is difficult to maintain because
people quickly return to the old habits that ignore
environment. This prolonged pandemic attests that
everything in the universe is interconnected and
dependent on one another. This is to say that the
three essential and intertwining human relationships
with the Creator, fellow creatures, and the earth
itself are inherent in people of all nations, with and
without religions. French modernist philosopher and
anthropologist Bruno Latour calls for ​​restoring the
status of the earth as a subject instead of an object
that people can control at will (Latour, 2015). Our
sweltering planet is indeed a friend not a foe.
Unfortunately, human behavior towards nature
has resulted in irreparable ecological damages (Dewi,
2017). In the long run, excessive treatment of the
earth that supports people’s life has brought about
Poetika, Vol. 10, No. 1, June 2022
damaging impacts on human beings. Just as natural
environment degenerates, so does humans’ dignity.
In Indonesia, exploitation of nature includes illegal
logging, unauthorized coal mining, large-scale hunting
of protected animals, as well as forest and land clearing
for industrial sites. The lack of legal protections for
customary lands in Central Kalimantan triggered
conflicts between the indigenous Dayak communities
and the incoming multinational investors. The forced
land grabbing that targeted the indigenous people of
Kampung Durian Selamak, Langkat regency in North
Sumatra for the state-owned plantation company is
another example. Next, women in the Pasar Seluma
village in Bengkulu, South Sumatra, said no to the sand-
mining activities that disturbed their daily routines.
Meanwhile, in Central Java, some residents of Wadas
village in Purworejo refused to give up their land to
make way for the massive Bener Reservoir, and the
civil unrest and clash with police forces ensued. Here
we see the concomitant political and environmental
upheaval upon the mismanagement of the earth as
“our common home”, to use Pope Francis’ words in his
climate change encyclical Laudato si’ (Francis, 2015),
and the call for fraternity and social friendship in this
“dark clouds over a closed world” stated in Fratelli
Tutti (Francisco, 2020).
Climate change is a complex issue. It requires
multiple approaches in order to find effective and
ecological ways to interact with the earth and all
of its inhabitants. Such an approach does not have
to come solely from natural sciences. Disciplines in
the humanities play an important role by means of
studies and activities in literature and art (Fischer,
2021). In recent years, ecocriticism, for example, has
gone beyond literary criticism in assessing its broader
cultural relevance, that is, the extent to which ecology
is related to societal problems as reflected in such
artifacts as poetry and arts. Hubbell and Ryan have
this to say: “In an era of climate change, deforestation,
melting ice caps, poisoned environments, and species
loss, many people are turning to the power of the arts
and humanities for sustainable solutions to global
ecological problems” (Hubbell & Ryan, 2021: i).
Various settlements of unfair land cases have drawn
criticism through literary and artistic works, among
others. The study of literary works that describe the
importance of natural environment and balanced
ecological relationships is nothing new. However, the
wealth of literary studies on environmental damage
12
in Indonesia mostly pay attention to prose works
(Hardiningtyas, 2016; Subagiyo & Yuniawan, 2022;
Sulistiyo, 2020; Sultan & Anshari, 2021); and only a few
focus on poetry (Liliani, 2022; Ryan, 2020a). Among
the scarcity of research in Indonesian ecopoetry is
a study on deforestation, loss of ecosystem, and
ecojustice toward the indigenous people in Khairani
Barokka’s Indigenous Species (Ryan, 2020a).
This article aims to discuss selected poems by
Eka Budianta being assumed as ecological narratives
worthy of investigation to find out how the poet
has contemplated on ecological debate throughout
the span of his career. Born on 1 February 1956 in
Ngimbang, Lamongan, East Java, Eka Budianta is an
environmental activist who has continued to write
poems since the 1970s. Having participated in the
1978 ASEAN poetry forum with roughly 50 leading
poets from ASEAN member countries, the youthful
new emerging writer Eka Budianta started to devote
himself to the world of words. His works have been
published in English, Dutch, French, Finnish, Arabic,
Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Javanese, and Balinese.
Mindful of the politics of translation that allows only a
handful of works by non-Western poets to be available
in European languages (Martha, 2017; Tachtiris,
2012), Eka Budianta has long been recognized as a
world poet. His selected poems appear in the bilingual
anthology Walking Westward in the Morning: Seven
Contemporary Indonesian Poets published in 1990.
Eka Budianta was then the “youngest” and “extremely
productive” among the poets included in the anthology:
Sapardi Djoko Damono, Toeti Heraty, Linus Suryadi
AG, Taufiq Ismail, Subagio Sastrowardoyo, and Arifin
C. Noer (McGlynn, 1990: xv). In 2012, the Government
of Indonesia gave the Language Month Award to Eka
Budianta for his collection of poems Langit Pilihan
(Ertanto, 2012: 1). Despite his numerous poems, this
study will limit itself to discuss 6 (six) poems by Eka
Budianta that deal with environmental themes. It
aims to fill up the lacuna of research on this important
writer with the exception of, for instance, recent
doctoral research on Eka Budianta’s short stories
that applies Glotfelty’s ecocritical theory (Fajar, 2019).
According to Fajar (2019), Eka Budianta sends the
environmentalist messages effectively through the
ecologically-inclined characters and well-crafted
settings such as forbidden forest, extinct animals’
habitat, a city cleaning department, etc. Meanwhile,
another study (Fadhillanisa & Hertiasa, 2014) looks
 Dewi - Ecological Lamentation and Advocacy in Eka Budianta's Selected Poems
at how Eka Budianta’s one single poem titled “Aku
Ingin Seorang Teman” is transformed into visual arts.
While this interdisciplinary study that incorporates
literature and arts is important, least attention is paid
to ecological issues.
This current study therefore intends to read
Eka Budianta in the light of Ecopoetry, i.e., a genre of
poetry that expresses prominent ecological values,
critiques environmental degradation, and upholds an
ethics of the natural world (Ryan, 2017). Emerging
in the 1990s, Ecopoetry questioned the relevance
of poetry about nature when nature itself has been
gradually depleting due to the global warming
and climate change. Ecopoetry can therefore be
interpreted as all poetry about ecology, environmental
injustice, climate change, flora and fauna, as well as all
narratives that have a green message (Clark, 2011).
Unlike pastoral poems written by British Romanticist
poets, Ecopoetry is often linked to contemporary
messages advocating green living and social activism
(Hubbell & Ryan, 2021). Ecopoetry becomes a catch-
all term for any types of activities which are related
to sustainability, conservation, and human-nature
relations.
The method used in this study is qualitative-
interpretative, employing as it does, a close reading
of each text alongside the principles in Environmental
Humanities (Hubbell & Ryan, 2021) and relevant
documents that speak for social and ecojustice
(Francis, 2015; Francisco, 2020). The texts that are
selected for close reading and analysis are the four
poems available in English (“River Notes”, “Song of a
Townsman”, “The Yearning of the Wind”, and “Song for
Tiom”) taken from Walking Westward in the Morning
(McGlynn, 1990); “Setelah Saudaraku Tenggelam”
from the aforementioned award-winning book Langit
Pilihan (Budianta, 2020); and “Sungai Sejati” taken
from the recently published Sungai Sejati: Surabaya
Zaman Omikron (Budianta, 2022). Throughout the
discussion, the English translation of the last two
poems by the present author is used. The steps are
as follows: reading, interpreting, and speculating
(Timpane, 2001). Each line and/or stanza of the poems
is read to comprehend its use of diction, imagery, and
structure and their literal meanings. Having examined
the language and content of the poem, the next step is
interpreting each poem to get the implied meaning. J.
C. Ryan (2020b) argues that Phytocriticism is useful
in analyzing Ecopoetry to see how ecological aspects
of the text operate. Using features and assumptions in
Ecopoetry, the final step is to speculate on the ways
by which Eka Budianta’s poetical imagination can be
seen as a response to ecological damages in Indonesia
that the poet has sought to contemplate.
FINDING AND DISCUSSION
The two-part discussion in this article presents an
analysis of Eka Budianta’s selected poems through
Ecopoetry lenses. The poems fall into two thematic
categories. The first category consists of poems that
grieve over environmental degradation. The second
category involves poems that bemoan the spoiled
environment coupled with a call for action.
Ecological Laments
“River Notes” is the first of 12 poems of Eka Budianta
in the bilingual anthology mentioned above. It is
a story of a polluted river. Originally written as
“Catatan Sungai” in 1984, the poem opens with a
slightly nostalgic atmosphere: “Suddenly the river
falls silent as it passes through the city” (1), lamenting
the loss of its “splashing as in the mountains” (2) and
“rolling as in its estuary” (3). The next line “The river
is pale, hiding its grief” (4) enhances this feeling of
being forgotten and badly treated. The rest of the
stanza narrates the cold presence of the river in the
cityscape. It ignores the passing boats, the bridge, and
the canals. The line “ignoring the drowning moon”
(7) intensifies the river’s day-to-day boredom and
solitary. The second stanza that begins with “The river
suddenly seems to hate the city /Perhaps it is cross,
angry, or disappointed” (10-11) further emphasizes
the lifelessness of the river that “behaves like a sick
rooster” (12) who does not eat, crow, fight, and love,
but [staring] “at the city that pisses on it” (15). Here,
the poem draws attention to the river that resists the
city which are non-human subjects who behave like
human beings. Implied herein is environmental harm
perpetrated by people. The poem is thus an example of
a story told from the perspective of the environment
that is recognized in a discipline called Environmental
Humanities (Hubbell & Ryan, 2021).
The next poem “The Yearning of the Wind”, also
written in 1984 as “Kerinduan Angin”, is a metaphor
– the speaker is the wind. It tells of the speaker’s
desire to go home after having travelled worldwide.
Despite the excitement of quest in the South Pole
13
Poetika, Vol. 10, No. 1, June 2022
with penguins whose “wings and legs” caked in snow
(10), the wind longs for such home-grown plant life
as teak trees, fragrance-of-the-night, and frangipani.
The phrase “the frangipani in the village’s bosom”
(13) evokes an imagery of the warmth of the tropical
homeland. The speaker comes across as a little upset.
He experiences such an environmental and moral
alienation, saying “I am the wind, tired of travelling
alone” (14). The following lines emphasize his
overwhelmingly negative sense of modernity: “Cities,
planes, the fumes of industry /Sicken and weaken me”
(5-16). As the speaker is unable to find a way out, his
possible solution is asking for divine intercessions to
help him to return to the bliss of nature: “God, send
me back to the teak forest /Let me sleep in the banana
leaves, /Lay me down in the hills that gave birth to me”
(18-20). Without directly engaging with, for instance,
celebration of the beauties of nature, the conflicting
correlation between industrial worlds and idyllic
sceneries preferred by the speaker makes this poem
a worthy object of ecocritical considerations. First,
vegetal words proliferate throughout “The Yearning of
the Wind”. The poem calls for everyday act of paying
attention to nature with which conservation actions
will likely occur. Second, the narrative of ecological
displacement is equally strong in this metaphoric
poem. The yearning speaker experiences the betrayal
of, to borrow Ecocritical Humanities’ vocabulary,
“sense of place”, i.e., the distinctive feeling of a
particular place by means of his sense, body, mind,
and memory that is important for his identity (Hubbell
& Ryan, 2021: 77). This poem therefore provides a
good example of eco-conscious literature through the
narrative of a man who regrets the loss of nature due
to the arrival of machinery in modern-day society.
In addition to the hustle and bustle of city
life that Eka Budianta often criticizes in his writing,
violence in the city is evident in the third poem
discussed, “Song of a Townsman”. Written in 1984 as
“Nyanyian Seorang Urban”, the poem offers a comment
upon how life in big cities is dreadful; People can get
killed easily in a road accident. The poet writes:
Who teaches us to sever
The head of the sparrow with a sling?
Who teaches us to smash
The head of a brother with the wheels of a
car? (1-4)
Here, a creature loving culture is introduced in
14
the beginning of the poem by equating people’s life
with that of a bird, how the former is as valuable as
the latter, contrary to the anthropocentric texts that
ignore non-human subjects. If mildly, the poem may
exemplify the use of Zoocriticism (Ryan, 2017) that
invites reader to see texts through an animal-focused
lens. By recognizing the importance of non-human
subjects, the poem illustrates principles of ecojustice
and interconnectedness of all living things. It is clear
here that there are obvious parallels between this
poem (and almost all of Budianta’s environmental
poems) and ecological arguments in such texts as
Laudato si’ and other Environmental Humanities’
discourse. To quote at length the interconnectedness
of the whole creation in the encyclical letter,
The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little
flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle
of their countless diversities and inequalities
tells us that no creature is self-sufficient.
Creatures exist only in dependence on each
other, to complete each other, in the service of
each other (Francis, 2015: 36).
The speaker of the poem continues to narrate how
the victim’s blood reminds him of that of war heroes
shed in a fierce battle, and how a scream of a woman
(maybe a bystander) jogs his memory of his friend’s
mother who cried out “on the morning [his] friend’s
brother died” (10). “Now I witness the ease with which
one loses his soul,” (11) the speaker continues, “Now
I witness the swiftness with which a hit-and-run car
vanishes in the city’s bustle.” (14). The repetition
of “Now I witness” here sustains the speaker’s
consternation. The car accident gives the speaker
the knowledge of the short and cheap life in the city
while simultaneously unmasking how modernity may
not be the best lifestyle of inhabiting the earth. The
contrast is clear: Village life offers a safe space while
danger is lurking in the city. By further alluding to
violence acts done by the “hit-and-run car” that swiftly
disappears amidst “the city’s bustle”, the speaker
expresses his repugnance at the excessive crime of
the city life. The poem ends with a similar question set
forth in the opening “Who allows us to smash our own
brother’s head with the muzzle of a car,” which, again,
remains unanswered. Here, the reader’s surprise at
this paradox of progress (symbolized by the car)
helps reinforce the message that technology does not
necessarily improve human bonds.
 Dewi - Ecological Lamentation and Advocacy in Eka Budianta's Selected Poems
At this stage, it is clear that “River Notes”, “The
Yearning of the Wind”, and “Song of a Townsman”
have one thing in common: discontentment about
the abused environment, hence the speaker’s
lamentation. The speaker appears disenchanted and
quite frustrated in coping with this state of affairs.
It is implied in each poem that, thus far, the speaker
can hardly perform tangible activities in caring for
the earth. While displacement is clear in all poems
discussed above, the analysis of the next three
poems to which the discussion now turns depicts the
speaker’s will power to stop ecological destruction.
Ecological Advocacy
The problem raised by “Song for Tiom” is essentially:
Is modernism the best pursuit? Written in 1984 as
“Nyanyian untuk Tiom”, the poem is a monologue
spoken by an Indonesian living abroad who observes
the depletion of culture and nature for the sake of
infrastructure development in Tiom. The town of
Tiom is the administrative center of Lanny Jaya
Regency located off-center in the Papua Province of
Indonesia (then called Irian Jaya when Eka Budianta
wrote this poem). It opens with the speaker’s concern
that in Tiom, “the moon and tractor unite in the
fields” (1) which has made the speaker worried and
wondering. So, he asks his friend what the change in
Tiom is all about: “And you, what are you doing now
my friend?” (4) Still in the same stanza, he answers
his own question:
In Tiom, with computers & tractors
I imagine you processing Indonesia
While I stand on this escalator here
Staring at the future and the past
Which have suddenly gathered to become
today (5-9)
In the second stanza, the speaker becomes
more desperate. In London, he is standing in the
station “doing nothing” (10) for his friend who is astir
while “Tiom is seething” (11). He then rhetorically
asks in line 13 “Who is it who owns Irian?” to be
answered, again, by himself: “If it is the trees, then
why the many salesmen, numerous televisions” (14).
In addition to computers and televisions, further signs
of new lifestyle (and culture shock) are conveyed in
such images as “People exchange their sheaths for
computers /To be modern, they say, to be cultured”
(15-16). The speaker laments that trees are being
bulldozed to make way for new road and buildings.
Worse still, people begin to welcome modernistic
ways of life and leave traditional culture behind.
By the third stanza, imagery of plants and animal
worlds is the technique used to provide contrast with
the previous stanzas where technology-related-words
like “tractor”, “computer”, “escalator”, “process”, etc.
predominate. Campaigning for the power of poetry,
the speaker invites the “academics to plant fruit trees,
/To raise chickens and ponds of fish. /Or, only, to force
the hunters to stop shooting birds and skewering
turtles” (20-21). More nature-related words appear
in this last stanza. The monologue ends with a pledge:
“When this poem reaches you, my friend /Tell the
tribal head, I am not idle” (22-23). Here, the speaker
assigns a campaigner role to himself to protect Tiom.
Ecocritical reading of “Song for Tiom” unveils
human detachment from nature. To speculate,
oscillation between the pastoral ideals and industrial
growths is no stranger to Eka Budianta. Classic
environmental writings like Leo Marx’s The Machine
in the Garden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring must
have been continually influential by the time the poem
was written in 1980s. Like Marx and Carson, it is
apparent that the poet points out the fact that human
relationships were poorly substituted by the presence
of technology in Tiom. Read in today’s context when
natural exploitations have continued to happen in
this part of Indonesia, the poem, again, echoes what
Pope Francis implores in Laudato si’ not to embrace
technology at the expense of social bonds but to use
it wisely for the common good. “Song for Tiom” thus
helps expose humans’ willful ignorance of abusing
natural environments in the name of progress.
The next poem to discuss, “Setelah Saudaraku
Tenggelam”, published in 2012, is a reminiscence
of the collapse of Situ Gintung Dam in Cireundeu,
Tangerang, West Java on March 27, 2009 that
claimed hundreds of lives and missing people. Built
during Dutch colonial rule to contain water from the
Pesanggrahan River, the dam was located in what’s
supposed to be a conservation area. Information about
the setting is provided in the first stanza: “Situ Gintung
disappeared in an instant, along with 200 residents
buried underneath. /The lake disappeared on March
27, 2009, in the midst of a frenzied campaign” (1-2).
With the following line, “But Jakarta and I quickly
forgot, as if nothing had happened.” (4), the poem’s
15
Poetika, Vol. 10, No. 1, June 2022
central theme is clearly introduced, namely the
speaker’s sense that humankind cannot comprehend
the fragility of the world they live in. The second
stanza describes the ensuing disaster that was soon to
happen after a thousand days had passed and the lake
was filled again with rain after rain only to drown the
city. The stanza ends with ecocritical notes: “The sea
level will rise, drowning coast after coast. /In the great
flood of warming the world. Globally, so it is said.” (7-
8). Next, having explained that the site by the lake was
a venue for the speaker’s children and grandchildren
to go for playing, schooling, and turning fruits into
Latin lessons, he admitted that he was consoled by the
prospect of turning the place into an orchard.
This poem, like other pro-nature poems by Eka
Budianta, is replete with vegetal vocabulary in the
likes of apple, banana, mango, durian – all fruits that
can grow in the tropics. Speaking of praxis, it would
seem that the poet’s credibility in writing about plant
life manifests itself herein. To date, Eka Budianta
is a regular editor-contributor to a monthly floral
culture and horticultural magazine. Reading the poem
through a plant-focused lens will reveal that the poem
recognizes people as on par with plants, in this case,
fruits of all kinds whose Latin names are delightfully
memorized by the speaker and his grandchildren. This
finding is comparable to several important works on
arboreal aspects in comparative ecocritical reading
of Indonesian and Southeast Asian poetry (e.g. Liliani,
2022; Ryan, 2020; Yulianto, 2020). It would seem
that the presence of non-human and human subjects
in environmental narratives helps evoke the green
message that authors seek to promote. Here, Eka
Budianta does just that in this rather dark four-stanza-
poem. The closure of the poem goes as follows.
My sorrow is buried in the joyous cries of my
grandchildren,
Ask for Garciana mangostana!
Mangosteen guava rambutan as he pleases,
There is no Situ Gintung, nothing.
I have re-established a paradise of duku,
salak, durian and all fruits
Over the lake and hundreds of my lost
relatives. (15-20)
At first glance, the final stanza is somewhat
disconcerting. One might think that the speaker is
insensitive as to forget the disaster and the deceased
and that he builds his own paradise of fruits instead.
16
However, by re-examining the opening line, “But
Jakarta and I quickly forgot, as if nothing had
happened” (4) and the last line, the reverse is true.
It can be interpreted that the speaker is after all fully
aware of the trivialization of the disaster that he too
helps to partake. The power of “over the lake and
hundreds of my lost relatives” comes from a vivid
contrast. One is the location of the pleasure-giving-
fruit-laden-trees; the other is the grim message of
the disappearance of the dam. A verbal irony is the
technique used herein. The speaker is a synecdoche
of all people who (ab)use environment for their own
gain. Although Bahari says that Eka Budianta is among
the dissident poets of the 1970s who depicts Jakarta
being the microcosm of Indonesia as a place that is
“worse than hell” (2011: 84), “Setelah Saudaraku
Tenggelam” suggests evidence to the contrary. There
is still a hope to turn the place into a heavenly one even
if it is at the cost of the dead in Situ Gantung disaster.
It is important to note here that Eka Budianta did not
read Laudato si’ when writing the poem twenty years
ago, but the message here is resonant with what the
encyclical letter says later that poor ordinary people
are the most victimized in any environmental disaster.
Speaking further of Covid-19, the Pope stated that the
most vulnerable suffered directly from the disease
that was exacerbated by mistreatment of the earth
(Deane-Drummond, 2020).
Finally, the post-coronavirus world invites
poets including Eka Budianta to provide poetry as
a source of solace. The last poem discussed, “Sungai
Sejati,” is his newest poem published in 2022. Unlike
the previous two poems discussed in this section, this
river poem strikes a more optimistic note. Written in
modern sonnet form, the first three lines introduce
the importance of the river: “A true river can hardly
be alone /It should be serviceable for the stag and
the shellpad /Priceless for people and town” (1-
3). Water from the river is indispensable not only
for humans but also for other living creatures like
stag (deer) and shellpad (turtle). Indeed, deer is an
echo of a biblical image of thirsting soul as sung by
the Psalmist: “As the deer pants for water, so my
soul pants for You”. Meanwhile, the natural habitat
for turtle is water. Additionally, by juxtaposing the
mammal who craves for water and the long-living
reptile who cannot do without water, the poet
reminds us about the indispensability of the river
that “flows in your heart and in my heart” (4). One
 Dewi - Ecological Lamentation and Advocacy in Eka Budianta's Selected Poems
can compare this poem with “River Notes” examined
in the first part of the discussion section whereby the
river passes the bridges with no smiles. “Sungai Sejati”
is conversational, depicting as it does a more friendly
and understanding river. Declaring that the river
allows the bridge to overpass between two lonely
cliffs, the speaker goes on saying “like I greet you at the
end of the night” (5-7). The use of the second point-
of-view helps support the personification of the true
river who is durable and indestructible:
A true river befriends the moon,
Living with the sun,
Choked by the flood,
surviving in the rain and drying drought. (8-
11)
The above lines further show that the text is rich
in non-human subjects. It displays the relationships
between people and nature, hence worthy of ecocritical
analysis. Next, at the metaphorical level, similar to the
wind in “The Yearning of the Wind” discussed earlier,
the river can be likened to the poet himself. Closing
the sonnet, the poet writes:
A true river gains a thousand dreams
A thousand prayers and a thousand new tasks
Waiting on throughout its passage of life.
(12-14)
The lines above raise a speculation that Eka
Budianta talks about his own lifelong commitments in
environmental issues. He was engaged in, for example,
procuring and distributing masks and mineral
water when shocking forest fire hit Kalimantan in
1997/1998 (Mangunjaya, 2008: 7). It was the biggest
forest fire in the history of environmental disaster
in Indonesia. Eka Budianta was then the Director of
Dana Mitra Lingkungan who had actively involved
in natural disaster mitigation. Founded by the first
state minister of environment and economist Emil
Salim, this organization has been more than 30 years
serving Indonesia with the support of the business
world and people of high integrity to create a better
living environment.
As a note in passing, on 18 March 2022, Eka
Budianta shared about the process of creating his
poems and his views on the transformative power of
poetry at the launch of his Sungai Sejati: Surabaya at
the Age of Omicron. In that event held by Bengkel Muda
Surabaya who celebrated its 50th anniversary, poetry
enthusiasts read Eka Budianta’s poems, showing as
they did their admiration and indebtedness to the
Maestro who has continued to believe in the wonder
of poetry.
CONCLUSION
This article has shown that Eka Budianta’s selected
poems address environmental degradation and
emphasize personal discontent of a city life held in
the grip of a modern, capitalistic, and profit-oriented
culture. The six poems discussed draw attention to
the grim truth about the way human beings (mis)
treat environment for the sake of growth and the
impacts thereof. One can read into these poems: (1)
Eka Budianta’s all-time appreciation for the wonders
of nature; (2) his critique of imbalanced people-nature
relationships; and (3) the presence of non-human
subjects that incorporate environmentalist views.
All poems under discussion have shown a prevailing
focus on environmental conservation and the call
for establishing balanced ecological relationships.
Given that these poems were written when climate
change had not been a critical issue as it is today, Eka
Budianta’s four early poems and two recent poems are
therefore ecologically celebratory and ahead of its time.
It is not an overstatement to say that Eka Budianta’s
consistency in dealing with ecological problems spans
across millennia. The four poems written before
the year 2000 contain bittersweet stories about
environmental crisis and the speaker’s resentment
about the ways people and progress pollute the earth.
The other two published in 2000s are protest poetry
as climate change becomes gradually uncontrollable.
To be specific, the most recent poem written in 2022
is of blatant environmental advocacy, but the poet
seems to be less hard-hitting, opting instead to use
soft-power in arts named poetry. Thus, an ecocritical
reading of Eka Budianta’s works may help reveal
that human beings have made natural environment
unequal co-existence as postulated by Latour, cited in
the beginning of the article. In conclusion, this article
agrees with the idea that literature can participate
in providing an explanation of global warming and
sustainability issues that ecological practices have
sometimes overlooked.
17
Poetika, Vol. 10, No. 1, June 2022
STATEMENTS OF COMPETING INTEREST
The author declares that there is no relevant financial
or non-financial competing interest upon the
submission of manuscript in this journal.
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